As Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, people across the U.S. tuned in to watch her tell the emotional story of her alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavavaugh more than 30 years ago.

Across the country — on the radio, television or the phones they carried — Americans listened.

On airplanes, they watched. And some cried.

They watched on C-SPAN, where some viewers began calling in with their own stories of sexual assault.

Chef and television host Anthony Bourdain was found dead in a hotel room in France, his employer CNN said in a statement Friday morning. He was 61. The network and a French official said the cause of death was suicide.

President Trump's nominee for the head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, was questioned this week by the Senate intelligence committee about her role in the agency's interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Under my leadership, on my watch, CIA will not restart a detention and interrogation program," she told the committee. But many senators believe she did not oppose torture strongly enough, and they pressed her on what her role was in the CIA's interrogation program.

An Israeli intelligence firm was hired last year to do "dirty ops" research on former Obama administration officials who worked on the Iran nuclear deal, according to reports in the U.K.'s Observer and The New Yorker.

Mike Pompeo, currently the director of the CIA, testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today as President Trump's nominee to be the next secretary of state. Pompeo faced a battery of questions not only on matters of diplomacy but also on whether he is willing to stand up to the president.

As part of the settlement after it got caught cheating on its emissions tests, Volkswagen has bought back about 350,000 of its U.S. diesel vehicles. The automaker so far has spent more than $7.4 billion on the cars, according to court filings seen by Reuters.

Fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin tells NPR's Morning Edition that political forces in the Trump administration want to privatize the VA — and that he was standing in the way.

"There are many political appointees in the VA that believe that we are moving in the wrong direction or weren't moving fast enough toward privatizing the VA," he said. "I think that it's essential for national security and for the country that we honor our commitment by having a strong VA. I was not against reforming VA, but I was against privatization."

An Ohio fertility clinic said that the remote alarm system on its storage tank was turned off, so it didn't know that the temperature had fluctuated, and that the consequences were worse than it initially thought — all 4,000 eggs and embryos in the cryofreezer are likely nonviable.

Authorities arrested a man in Washington state on Tuesday in connection with a number of suspicious packages that arrived Monday at federal facilities in and around Washington, D.C.

Thanh Cong Phan, 43, was arrested at his home in Everett, Wash., the FBI said. He was taken into custody by FBI agents from the Seattle field office and Snohomish County sheriff's deputies around 12 hours after the first package was discovered.

A French police officer who was severely wounded on Friday after exchanging himself for a gunman's hostage has died of his injuries, raising the death toll in the attack to four, according to French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb.

Col. Arnaud Beltrame, 44, was one of the first police officers to respond to the attack on a supermarket in southern France, which began after a gunman killed one victim in a carjacking, then killed two others in the grocery store. Sixteen others were also wounded in the attack.

The city council in Los Alamitos, Calif., voted on Monday night to exempt itself from the state's so-called sanctuary law, which limits cooperation between local enforcement and federal immigration agents authorities.

And in the process, the Orange County city of fewer than 12,000 is aligning itself with a harder line on immigration than the more liberal policies adopted elsewhere in California.

Florida transportation officials say that an engineer with the private firm that designed the concrete bridge that collapsed Thursday called the state two days before the incident to report cracks in the structure.

It's not immediately known whether the reported cracks contributed to the collapse of the pedestrian walkway that was intended to join the campus of Florida International University and the city of Sweetwater.

The U.S. Justice Department has charged three Central Illinois men with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque in August.

Michael Hari, 47, Michael McWhorter, 29, and Joe Morris, 22, were charged with using an explosive device to damage the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, near Minneapolis. No one was hurt in the bombing, which exploded in the imam's office.

The suspect in the fatal shooting of two people at Central Michigan University is now in custody, the school said early Saturday.

Nineteen-year-old James Eric Davis Jr. was "seen and reported by an individual on a train passing through the north end of campus shortly after midnight. Law enforcement personnel responded and arrested the suspect without incident," the university said.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has ordered an investigation into law enforcement's response to the shooting in Parkland earlier this month.

Broward Sheriff Scott Israel is under scrutiny for how his office handled complaints it received about Cruz in the years before the shooting, as well as reports that deputies failed to act during the shooting itself.